TeaBass.com

New stuff

After a couple days of nothing I did a little web design yesterday.

Fishbitt.com, a funky star in the right corner which will have a description of fishbitt on it. At the moment it’s lyrics from a song by CAKE called comfort eagle.

Lots more planned for fishbitt, bits to show off my portfolio and more links and info, but still keeping it quite clean and simple.

The other bit I did yesterday was Laurenf.net/beta, as you can see I went a bit crazy with the stars. Lauren likes the other menu better, thats why it is only on the beta page.

It feels like a rather lazy day ahead of me, I’m not going to fight it!

Only one more week of making fans for me, and under two weeks until my driving test… YAY

Thought 13

More info on the issues with my last client, it has all been sorted out now, the issues came from them not being anywhere near transparent enough with me.

But I have got another project starting instead, a definite money maker

I saw the first concepts for the fishbitt Logo today, there is one which jumped out at me, it’s going to look great! .. And no, you can’t see it yet!!!

Improvements

I’ve been doing more and more web development stuff recently, and I think it is going to become a more major part of my business than I first thought. I was browsing Teabass and I realised that I had not finished it and Fishbitt is in a bit of disarray at the moment too.

I can’t go promoting my web development and design skills with half finished websites!

At the moment with my current situation I can’t just fix all these things in one big hit, my day is so crammed up with my temporary day job, driving lessons and something always going on in the evenings and weekends that I’m going to have to make it a gradual process.

I started with Laurens photo website, LaurenF.net, which I finished a while ago but never tested it too much, so I did some browser testing and optimization. It is working really nice and has valid XHTML and CSS. Once I have a bit more free time I want to move it onto rails and setup up a simple backend to allow Lauren to upload photos to it easily.
(I just noticed it needs a favicon and a 404 error page!)

I’ve also been tweaking Teabass as you “should” have noticed, changed from green to blue, made it fit properly inside an 800×600 window and removed the bubble from all but the front page. I still have a few small tweaks to do as well as adding some content in the about section and a page or too. I’m going to be doing a little bit to it every night this week.
(Favicon, png hack, validation, flickr, about and some usability issues still to fix/add)

Once Teabass is sorted I can start to add content to Fishbitt, at the moment it is 1 page and some css on my desktop. You can keep up with news and updates on the Fishbitt developments over at the Fishlog.

I’ve gotten my motivation back, and I’m going to make the most of it.

The website I was sposed to be starting in a weeks time for a big company has decided they wish to do it “in-house” (read big business didnt want to pay relativly cheap web programming costs, I offered a site at £20 per hour, instead wanting someone who will do it for less than £8 per hour), but it is their loss not mine.

It took me a few days to get over my anger at how the business asked for my ideas and then told me they would only employ me a stupidly low rate, after feeling like a doormat (a feeling I know very well) I have got over it and learnt from the experience greatly.

This post is getting on a bit so I’ll cut it there. Thanks for all your helpful advise and great comments, you regular readers will be rewarded soon enough

Thought 12

Poor Teabass, it never really got finished, at least the theme didn’t. So all this week I will be finishing off a few little things that I’ve noticed. Any suggestions, tweaks or bugs are very welcome.

Frustration

Things were going really well for me last week, but this week they have taken a turn for the worse.

I’m lacking in motivation, energy and I’m generally pissed off at everything.

I may not be doing the website I thought I was, it’s all up in the air, I can’t really speak about it too much yet as I’m not sure of the outcome. That put me in a terrible mood yesterday and everything after that seems to be going wrong!!

Everything is jsut pissing me off and to top it all off… I was going to buy a macbook yesterday, but due to the issues with my current client, I can’t depend on getting paid so I’ve had to put it off.

Grrrr

I’m still doing lots of Rails reading, I’m starting to get the hang of it, I’ve been building an app, although I have not had the time to finish it.

I’ll update properly at the end of the week, hopefully I won’t be in such a bad mood.

p.s. I’m doing some tweaking on the theme, so if anything seems broken it should be fixed by tomorrow.

p.p.s Thank you Lauren for putting up with my pissing and moaning yesterday (I tweaked her site a little too)